Well, now that I am done distracting myself with mallets, saw benches and cleaning it is time to get back at this. I have set an arbitrary deadline of September(ish) for completion of this bench so it is time to ramp things up a bit.

We left off with a partially fitted end cap in the last blog. A bit more progress has been made there. I have the Dovetails cut and “fitted (will require more plugs and shims.. perhaps by the 4th dovetail I will have this figured out?)

As before I added a filler piece..

Love these things!

Put on some SRV and got to work..

This time I positioned the top in a more saw friendly position. Helped a lot.. (which inspired the saw bench.. see how this goes?).

Then I wanted to add some support to the back wall of the tool well. I have been worried about the thickness of the wall since I added it. I seems to me it would flex too much during seasonal expansion of the top so I added some oak to the back side as a support..

I didn’t spend too much time making it pretty.. it’s on the bottom and covered anyway. I just needed it to funtion… I think it will do fine.

Then this morning I started on the dados that will hold the tray bottom in. I opted to just chop out the ones on the end caps since stopped dados can get tricky with a plow plane and I would have had to chop most of it out anyway to get the plane to work properly. The new mallet just laughed at this and it took all of about 20 mins from layout to finished for both sides to be done.

Test fit and checking if it is consistent across the bottom.. pretty darn close enough..

Now time to get this iron sharpened and get the other 2 walls done.. but that is for tomorrow.

@Eric—Fine work going on in the shop. I saw what look like blood drippings too—thought you had finished your mallet in Type A. Dovetails and mortises are looking very well. More galoot points on the way—you should be able to get a couple of nights’ hotel stays with all those galoot points building up!

-- People say I hammer like lightning. It's not that I'm fast -- it's that I never hit the same place twice!